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Chat With The Inventors Of MIT's Remarkable, Shapeshifting inFORM Interface

The Tangible Media Group at MIT's Media Lab has unveiled a futuristic display made of atoms, not pixels. Join our Q&A with inFORM's inventors on Thursday, November 21st at 3pm Eastern.

"inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table's surface."

Guided by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, Follmer and Leithinger have created the inFORM, a futuristic shapeshifting display that allows you to not only physically interact with digital content, but hold hands with another person from hundreds of miles away.

On Thursday, November 21st at 3pm (ET), the maverick minds who brought the inFORM to life will be joining us to discuss the future of computer interaction. Moderated by Co.Deisgn writer John Brownlee, the group will discuss the invention of the inFORM, the future of interfaces, and gadgets that can transform themselves into anything we need them to be.

You can submit your own questions ahead of time by using the "Make a comment" box below.

"inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table's surface."

Hi guys, this is John Brownlee here. Hope everyone's ready for shapeshifting displays of living clay, because we're about to get elbows-deep in them. We're starting in about fifteen minutes, so if you have a question about the inFORM, please leave them and we'll try to get to as many as possible!

So in other words, tangible media is imagining a world where our digital interfaces are somehow made physical, for us to interact with in the real world. The inFORM is this shapeshifting table that is one possible solution to that problem. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea for the inFORM?

Yes a great example of how we can embody digital information through tangible interfaces is this project called SandScape from the early 2000s Sandscape. This system is for land scape designers that gives projected feedback on their designs allowing them to use clay or sand to sculpt their models. Digital simulation like water runoff can be projected on top of the sand. This is a great approach to giving feedback, but the computer system it self cannot change its shape. We are currently limited by computer interfaces' static form.

So when looking at SandScape, we noticed a couple of limitations, because it can only sense material and project light on top of it. If we want to save a model and send it to a collaborator or zoom in on a detail, or see how it evolves over time, we need the ability to output physical shapes rapidly. That was the starting point for a project called Relief, which I worked on as a masters thesis project in 2009:

So in simple terms, it is like you described it in your article. The shape display is a fancy pin screen, where we can control each pin with a motor. Right now, we have 900 of such pins built into a table top. For remote communication, we connect the table to a Kinect; one one end we capture a person and objects, on the other end we output the shape and graphics on the table. That way we can show the persons hand and move objects on the table.

We see a future where we program physical shape output as quickly and easily as we can currently program pixels on a computer screen, to adapt to the ways users want to interact with them. So we view inFORM as a test bed to explore these interactions with Shape Changing interfaces, what we call radical atoms. But we are also looking at applications like 3D modeling, architecture, telepresence. These applications allow users to interact physically with 3D information.

Right now we are working the the Changing Places group here at the MIT Media Lab on a project, where inFORM is used for architects, to plan city layouts. They can stand around the table and discuss new buildings, but also discuss those changes with remote collaborators in real-time.

Another concrete application is for viewing and digging through volumetric data sets, we explored that a while ago and are still working on a new version of it: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/sublimate/ In addition we want to think about learning geometry and other important math concepts, physically. Just as many of us used tangrams or other physical blocks to learn basic math concepts, we hope to do the same for more complex geometry.

Today, designers and engineers use 3D printing to prototype their designs and understand them physically. However 3D printing takes a great deal of time. We view inFORM as a way designers can understand their 3D models physically before they 3D print them. In addition they can modify these physical models directly on inFORM like digital clay, and these are synced with the underlying 3D model.

Some other research groups have been looking at using a similar layout of pins for manufacturing, to create dynamic physical tooling molds. A good example is Ben Peter’s research here at the MIT Media Lab in the Mediated Mater Group of Neri Oxman: http://www.bnpeters.com/digitally-reconfigurable-mold.html

So you are using pneumatics today. Have you considered using metall pinart/pinhead instead? (smaller and more detail,) and electronic magnets on the other end? top of the pins could be any material you choose.

Great question! We are actually using electromotors, but some research groups have been using hydraulic systems (Georgia Tech’s Digital Clay initiative comes to mind: www.imdl.gatech.edu) or smart materials like Nitinol (Ivan Poupyrev’s Lumen project: www.ivanpoupyrev.com). The reason we went with the motors is because we wanted our prototype to be very fast, so that we could have real time interaction. But their disadvantage is that they are complex and bulky. So there is a lot of great work happening in Mechanical Engineering right now, that would be able to overcome these limitations.

I know the goal of the inFORM is primarily to explore the possibilities of the future, not suggest a specific commercial path, but do you think that something like the inFORM could really become commercially viable someday? If so, how long do you think it will be until we're taking interfaces like the inFORM for granted?

We are excited to come up with more compelling applications and scenarios that will excite industry partners about the promises of shape changing user interfaces like inFORM. Right now we see that there are a lot of lessons we have learned from inFORM that can be applied to other shape changing devices that are less complex, sooner than we see something like inFORM hitting the market. Some companies are creating flexible displays right now, and we believe that those could be combined with active shape change, such user interfaces might be coming to market sooner than later.

Okay, so speculatively, how long from now do you think interfaces like the inFORM will become mainstream? Wasn't so long ago that something like Microsoft's Kinect seemed like it was impossibly futuristic.

The ultimate vision of Radical atoms and programmable materials, is a far way away, it could be 50 -100 years before we achieve the necessary level of miniaturization for it to resemble highly detailed, functional objects. However we think that shape changing devices, something like a cell phone that can turn into a watch, will be here much sooner, in the next couple of years (4-10 years), as flexible displays, flexible circuit boards are already available. It is a problem of how to miniaturize actuation, and solve the issue of power consumption. Our group is looking at pneumatics as a solution to the actuation problem and has a prototype of a shape changing mobile device, PneUI.

So the end goal of the inFORM is this idea of radical atoms and "digital clay" where our interfaces can actually reconfigure and transform themselves into anything we need for them to be. How do you think that might change the way we interact with not just technology, but each other?

To answer the question about Radical Atoms: We believe the vision-driven research such as inFORM is critical to make a quantum leap in the interactions between human and digital information. There are many great, but incremental R&D (e.g. increase of resolution of graphical display) efforts going on, but we (Tangible Media group) are determined to devote our time and energy for the disruptive jump, rather than incremental improvement of the old concepts. Shape changing interfaces can better match their affordances, or their physical form, to the ways we need to interact with them.

And to talk about the interacting with other people: We think that telepresence is currently dominated by pushing audio and video to a higher fidelity. But haptics, the sense of touch, is completely underutilized. And that is a fundamental channel of communication between people, which is missing. But beyond this, when we are in a physical meeting, we use gestures, paper, and surfaces around us to interact. We think about transferring Body, Object, Space across distances.